Salesforce buys again for SharePoint-like content management

Acquisition of startup Koral will help business web users rein in unstructured data sprawl

Salesforce.com users will be able to discover and share files on their own or partners’ networks without going into Microsoft SharePoint or similar tools, thanks to the latest move by the on-demand customer relationship management (CRM) pioneer.

Through the acquisition of a Californian startup firm called Koral, Salesforce will provide web content management capabilities that are tied to its current platform. The Koral tools are being built into a new service called ContentExchange, while a tool called Apex Content will be available for application developers.

ContentExchange will let users store documents, tag them and share them. Users can be alerted when relevant items are created or updated, and can search for files based on criteria including tags, keywords, popularity rankings and timeliness. Users will also be able to expose content to external third-parties via Salesforce’s recently-announced AppSpace workspace.

Getting a grip on so-called unstructured data – text, web pages, presentations, images, audio and video, for example – is becoming a requirement for more firms as volumes of information mount up, making information difficult to discover and exploit.

“We’ve had our eye on content management for a while because customers are constantly swapping files,” said Clarence So, Salesforce’s European chief marketing officer. “We’ve had a traditional hierarchical, nested folders kind of look that you get in products like Documentum and we realised that didn’t work as well as YouTube and Flickr tagging.”

In his blog, software entrepreneur Zoli Erdos, described Koral as “a ‘bridge’ product, enhancing the productivity of largely offline users (working in MS Office) by offering an online service. I would love to see them move further on the offline/online continuum by offering online tools to not only preview but actually edit documents online.”

In a late-January response, Koral co-founder Tim Barker said he hoped Adobe’s Apollo project – a project to give web applications the richness of desktop apps – would help, but advised to “expect something soon” regarding shared review of documents.

Salesforce’s So conceded that current users seeking to edit files would not be able to do so without downloading applications to their desktops, unless they were web applications such as the Writely wordprocessor.

This is Salesforce’s third acquisition and all have been partners on the AppExchange roster of compatible applications, but So said it is not the company’s intention to pluck promising companies when they are ripe.

“It’s a fine line we have to pay attention to but we’d rather have the AppExchange populated by very successful companies,” So said. “All three acquisitions were very small companies in categories that weren’t well populated and they have all been very aligned with CRM. Our acquisition strategy is small and our partner strategy is very large. We don’t want to demotivate the community.”

Pricing and availability details for ContentExchange are due later this year.